The Two Biggest Obstacles To Mastery
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What's up? Crafters Khalil here and welcome to the Mindset Training of the program.
Today we're gonna be talking about the two biggest obstacles to mastery, how to detect if they're happening to you and I'm gonna show you how we're gonna overcome them.
This program is about one key thing and that is about achieving a level of mastery in your skills as a software developer. Why? So that you could go on to do better work, of course.
And so that you can open doors for yourself with better opportunities and feel confident in your ability to handle a multitude of situations that you'll be cast into. And of course, to stay on top of your game regardless of the way the industry changes, because it inevitably will change. But make no mistake, my friend, achieving anything great is gonna take hard work,
dedication, patience, and resilience. Because you will run into challenges, no doubt.
And that's why this section of the course, the mindset section [00:01:00] is incredibly critical to you making it through the program.
The last thing I want is for you to end up like a statistic of 60% of other course purchasers who just buy courses and never finish them or even worse than that, like the 30% of people who purchase courses log in once and then never come back.
Let's treat these next videos as if you're setting up to take a big swing. And these modules are key. So do not think for a second that you can skip these because they are really important.
But before we get into the two biggest obstacles to mastery, I want to go ahead and just take a second to talk about mastery.
Now, what is mastery? To me, mastery is when you have a level of skill and ability in some domain where it's like you're maneuvering it in 3d. You can combine ideas in really useful creative ways, and work feels really easy and fun.
It feels effortless, it feels challenging, and it feels interesting. You can also learn things really fast at this level because everything you've done is based upon a really strong [00:02:00] foundation that you've already built in the past.
For example;
once you master Abstraction Design, you're gonna be able to vet libraries and frameworks that come out tomorrow, the day after that next year, you're gonna be able to design custom abstractions. You're gonna be able to reason through your design decisions and make decisions with clarity and certainty.
And ideally, as your coach, I should become this funny little word that my professor used to always. Superfluous
which really is silly because it means "unnecessary" and it seems to be an unnecessary word in and of itself. Regardless, there should be very little need for me as your mentor or your coach moving forward after the program.
That's the goal here, and you should also be able to go ahead and mentor other developers and in case you haven't noticed, that's what I'm currently doing right now to reach even higher levels of mastery.
Yes, this is gonna take some effort, but what you can unlock with mastery is truly exciting, and it is only accessible to those who are willing to pay the price. [00:03:00] But because you're taking the program, the cost of mastery is gonna be a lot less than what it costs me in terms of time, money, and effort.
I've already gone down a lot of those rabbit holes myself, and I'm carving this curriculum to be the straight line to get you to the milestones as fast as possible. So make sure you are utilizing this community. You're utilizing me and you're utilizing the course.
Now the good news is that there is another hack to achieve levels of mastery very fast, and that hack is something called the flow state.
You've probably heard of this many times before, but in case you haven't,
the flow state is a state of consciousness that features extreme focus, concentration, and presence.
It's when space and time starts to blur together. Times you might have noticed this are when you're hanging out with friends you're comfortable with, when you're engaged in a really good puzzle, a great book, fun video game, or you're coding out a solution to a problem and you're watching yourself make progress, seeing yourself get closer to the goal with each and every single keystroke, and you're seeing the work that [00:04:00] you're doing as being important and relevant.
When you're in this position, you may just access that flow state and it's a state that feels really good.
And to me this is the ideal state of consciousness. The flow state has a lot of benefits.
You feel relaxed and you feel certain in your abilities when you're in this flow state. Things feel familiar even though they might feel challenging, but also when things are challenging, they feel fun. When you're tapped into this state, it's when you can access true creativity and you can do your best work and you can enjoy the process of whatever it is you're engaged in.
I personally find that this is where my best ideas come from, and this is where my major realizations arise,
So the next question is, how exactly do you access this state? Is it something that you could just turn on like a light? Well, No, it's not actually that easy.
You might find that it takes a little bit of time to get into the flow state, and it's true because it sits right in between two of the main flow blockers that we're about to talk about [00:05:00] now, and those two things are anxiety and boredom. So let's get into anxiety first.
Have you ever just been so overwhelmed with the task at hand that you don't even know where to start, or that there's just too much information to process or that you just don't have the skills in order for you to overcome the challenge that's in front of you?
This is a super common feeling. Especially if you're a newer developer and you're hearing a lot of stuff like dependency inversion, design patterns, repositories, aggregates, domain events, domain services, and so on and so forth.
I actually recently had a conversation with a developer where he was struggling to test his React code, and he was realizing that it was turning into a mess and he felt like there might have been a better way to do this, but he wasn't quite clear on how.
what happens here is when you realize that your skill level is a little bit off from what it is you're trying to do, you end up experiencing this phenomenon called Cognitive Dissonance.[00:06:00]
Cognitive dissonance is when you experience this sense of resistance. It's a sensation where you feel like you have your foot on the gas and your foot on the brakes at the exact same time, but instead of this being something that happens in person, it's actually happening in your mind.
So if you're coding and you're asking yourself, am I doing this right? Or I'm not sure if this is best practices or not, or should I be testing this? Then you're probably experiencing cognitive dissonance. You're getting sucked out of the present moment and shot up into your brain out of the work and it's causing you to become overly critical of what it is you're doing.
Either your mental models are wrong or you just haven't finished piecing things together. This puzzle of software design and architecture that we're doing. Either way, it is pulling you out of flow and it is keeping you at a plateau. And we want to overcome this so that we can continue and make progress.
And now the second obstacle to mastery is boredom This is when you experience no challenge in the [00:07:00] work that you're doing in front of you, because it doesn't feel relevant and it doesn't feel important.
In fact, it might even, in fact, it may even feel like a complete waste of time. And as a result, your mind is gonna wander and you're gonna want to feel like just doing something else.
In the context of this program, you're going to be asked to drill some assignments,
like contributing to the community, like asking questions. And if you see things like this as a waste of time
it's probably a matter of time before you get distracted, leave the course, start learning something else, or just take on some new challenge that's not related to what we're doing here.
From what I've seen working in Developer Experience, I've noticed that when developers experience this level of boredom at work with the things that they're doing, you tend to go on to learn new libraries, new frameworks.
You look into new jobs and accept positions or roles that you don't actually care about
or you might try to start your own side project, but not really fully do it. You might just half-ass it. And as a result, all of this turns to a level of burnout where
you [00:08:00] start to feel like you're not getting a return on investment from any of the things you've been trying to take on
You're not growing and you're wasting your time.
This is the experience that so many developers are feeling. And the antidote to this is to get to the root cause. To get clear on your purpose for what you're doing, why it is that you're doing it.
Because unless you can connect what you're doing at work or what you're doing in this program to something that really matters to you, it's gonna be really hard for you to stay on the path to stay focused.
There's always gonna be this sense of, what about this, what about that? And it's gonna create a lot of aimlessness. We want to avoid all that, and set some really good goals that actually inspire you and get you feeling excited about what it is you're gonna do here.
So with that said, those are the two key obstacles that are gonna block off our ability to access flow, and as a result, make it harder for us to achieve higher and higher levels of mastery.
Now, in the next videos, we're gonna go into some strategies for how to [00:09:00] combat these.
But just to recap, what we really want to do here is solve the anxiety problem with clarity and solve the boredom problem with purpose.
So go ahead, head on into the next modules.
Let's get you set up for success here so that you can start to see some real results in this program.
That's all for this video, and I'll see you in the next one. To Mastery.
[updated]
I 100% get the anxiety part. I get that at work when I am given a very complex feature. I try my hardest to only reach out for help when I am totally blocked. By then I have probably written a fair amount of code that is wrong.
Great insight & great self-awareness, Lloyd.
I've come to believe 80% of success is psychology, 20% is skill. And skill stuff is easy in comparison.
Cognitive Dissonance is definitely what I've been experiencing. I consider myself a motivated individual, but I definitely lose my flow state a lot because I'm constantly struggling between wanting to do it right, yet not knowing how to do it.
Great video Khalil. I already experienced a bit of boredom completing the FizzBuzz exercise. But, it's all good. I'm sure I will cross over into anxiety very soon 😅. And, I for sure have a purpose. I want to build a product from scratch. I'm hoping to get in a position to that via the course and the community.